In a parallel processing environment, a database can be shared by more than one process. For example, a database can contain records, each record containing entries related to customers of a company and entries related to products that the customers have ordered. A first process related to customer relationship management can attempt to access the database to update customer contact information of a particular record. A second process related to inventory control can also try to update a product specification contained in the same record. The customer relationship management information and the inventory control information within the same record can be dependent or independent of each other. To prevent multiple processes from updating the same record resulting in errors, a locking mechanism is provided so that before the first process attempts to modify a record, the first process “locks” the record to prevent other processes from modifying the record. When the second process attempts to modify a locked record, the attempt is rejected, and an error message is returned to the second process. The second process waits a period of time before attempting to modify the record again.